In an interview with Paste Magazine, Sheriff of Babylon collaborators Tom King and Mitch Gerads announced Mister Miracle. The 12 issue maxiseries continues the adventures of Scott Free, a character from legendary artist Jack Kirby’s Fourth World line of comics. The series, which will be lettered by Clayton Cowles, edited by Jamie Rich, and published by DC Comics, will begin in August.

King, riding high on the critical success of Omega Men, Sheriff of Babylon, and The Vision, characterizes Mister Miracle as Scott’s confrontation with the “part of him that doesn’t want to be told.” In keeping with Mister Miracle’s past, King describes the series as a story about “escape.” In the interview, he alludes to personal anxieties he feels as a comics writer and a citizen in the current political landscape. he sees Mister Miracle as an attempt to explore those feelings, working with Gerads to employ the nine panel grid structure King’s work has become synonymous with “to give you a sense of that claustrophobia.” It’s a story about the lengths we’ll go to to escape our destinies and the “real hidden secrets and the real hidden battles” behind the false fronts and veils we display to the world around us.

While King says Mister Miracle is less about American politics in 2017 and more about the feeling surrounding them, Gerads says that “It’s hard…not get super political. There’s so much in this world right now that isn’t lining up. You assumed there were safeguards in place to make sure things always do line up. It’s escaping that kind of world and trying to find the real world again. Hopefully that real world is still a thing that exists.”

When asked to describe the core of Mister Miracle, King said that:

No one can out-Kirby Kirby. You can’t make an epic as great as he did. It’s like trying to make Star Wars again, or like trying to rewrite the Iliad. You can take those grand cosmic space opera themes and internalize them and use them to tell a very personal story. That’s what appealed to me about it. We were going to take the bigness of Kirby and turn that into the intimacy of Mister Miracle’s life. Kirby used a metaphor for his time, written in the late ‘60s early ‘70s when the world was going utterly insane. We’re going to use it as a metaphor for our time, the late 2010s, when once again the world is going insane. It’s almost like we’re holding up a mirror to that work, or internalizing it. We’re going step-in-step with him.

Jamie Rich’s involvement on Mister Miracle, which appears to be a main-line DC title, is a bit of a surprise. Rich has, up until recently, has been known for heading up Vertigo and working as an editor of Young Animal’s line of titles. His involvement here may provide some insight into the new role he might serve at DC Comics now that former Batman line editor Mark Doyle is overseeing Young Animal and Vertigo.

Alex is the Managing Editor of the Comics Beat. He is also a freelance comics editor with previous credits at Papercutz. He lives and breathes city life and has an uncomfortably intense passion for fashion and instagrammable food. Additionally, he has no soul and thus mains Pharah.

I was looking forward to this until I read the part about how there’s so much that’s “not lining up” under the Trump administration. Super-hero comics should not be infused with political content even if its “hard” to avoid.

The people who say “Super-hero comics should not be infused with political content” probably spend all day watching Fox News and listening to conservative talk radio.

When Kirby drew Captain America punching Hitler, that was a RADICAL political statement. Especially as it appeared a full year before the U.S. was at war with Nazi Germany, when most comics (as well as movies and radio shows aimed at adults) were avoiding the words “Hitler,” “Nazi” and “fascist.”

Mister Miracle, to me is always about spectacle. Big, broad stokes, huge double page works of amazing artwork. This nine panel grid seems restrictive and while I understand what they are going for here I think it looks just awful. I’ll go ahead and pass on this.